A Website Dedicated to Northrop Frye

Daily Archives: October 25, 2011

“These guys on Wall Street are not winning – they’re cheating.” — Matt Taibbi in a scalding post reacts to the proliferating meme that the OWS protesters are “sore losers,” and provides a dizzying account of the double standard at work in the banking industry: “too big to fail” effectively means that banks have no market value and are completely dependent upon handouts and bailouts, while also stripping “sore losers” to the bone.

One of the things the blogger at thingsiwannashowmygirlfriend is the Frye-Kemp correspondence. This paragraph from one of the letters from Frye to Helen in 1932 caught his attention:

Denied the supreme satisfaction of the bed-sheets, he sublimates himself in letter-sheets. I carried on this literary flirtation with you some years ago, in the first summer I was home and we corresponded. But since I have grown to love you so immeasurably more than I did then, or could then, the ideal lady at the other end of the postal service has become a part of myself, and when I write I am painfully conscious only of your absence. Hence these awkward, stammering, whining, almost illiterate letters.

Zuccotti Park yesterday. This is well-assembled footage and provides a real sense of what is happening on the ground. I hope you’ll check out a minute or two of it.

Michael Greenberg in the New York Review of Books has an in-depth report on Occupy Wall Street from the scene. There is no on-the-ground report like this anywhere else. A sample:

At 7:30 PM, near the People’s Library, the General Assembly convened. There were about five hundred of us and, as far as I could tell, we were all members for as long as we hung around. From their perch atop the wall on the northeast section of the park, two young women moderated the meeting. “Mike check!” one of the women cried, and with a unison roar the crowd repeated her words. This was “the people’s mike,” used in lieu of bullhorns, megaphones, or other amplification devices that were prohibited because the protesters had no permit. When the crowd has to repeat every word, it shows; for example, during a speech by the Nobel Prize economist Joseph Stiglitz, things slowed down. But in the large crowd the repetition created a kind of euphoria of camaraderie. It also put you in the oddly disturbing position at times of shouting at full voice something you neither agreed with nor would ever have thought on your own.

On the agenda was the march to Foley Square the next day, but first the moderators wanted to know “if there are any concerns about our process.” For newcomers, the process was patiently explained, each phrase shouted back at the speaker as if to cheer her on. Anyone can submit a proposal to the General Assembly. To pass it must have 90 percent support judged by a show of hands, at which point it may be published online or in The Occupied Wall Street Journal. We were coached in the hand gestures that are the silent coded language of the protest. If you raised your hands over your head and wiggled your fingers like a partygoer in a group dance, it meant you agreed with what had just been said. Other gestures conveyed ambivalence, disagreement, and finally the blocking signal—a severe locking of forearms that, we were instructed, should be used only if you had “serious ethical concerns” with what was being proposed.

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Anne-Marie Slaughter, the well-known Princeton professor of international affairs, writing in TheNew York Times, points out that from the first days of Occupy Wall Street news outlets in the Middle East paid close attention. Referring to the Tunisian vendor whose self-immolation set off the Arab Spring, she writes:

Go to the Web site “We Are the 99 percent” and you will see the Mohamed Bouazizs of the United States, page after page of testimonials from members of the middle class who took out mortgages to pay for education, took out mortgages to buy their houses…worked hard at the jobs they could find, and ended up…on the precipice of financial and social ruin.

The protesters in Zuccotti Park seem to have heralded the membership of a significant portion of our population in a new form of Third World, a development that our media and government appear to have been the last to absorb.

Berkeley physicist, Richard Muller, until last week was the darling of the denialist community. However, after conducting his own study, funded in part by the Koch brothers, he recanted his skepticism and acknowledged that global warming is a scientifically proven fact. Needless to say, the right now angrily shuns him.